Profs & Pints Nashville: Smashing Protons, Solving Mysteries

Profs and Pints Nashville presents: “Smashing Protons, Solving Mysteries,” a brief crash course on sub-atomic physics and the “big science” projects undertaken to solve its huge questions, with Raghav (Rithya) Kunnawalkam Elayavalli, assistant professor of physics at Vanderbilt University.

[Doors open at 6 pm. Talk starts at 7.]

The cutting edge of research in fundamental physics often focuses on the natural world’s building blocks. It involves questions such as “What is the smallest form of matter?” and “How did it come about in the Big Bang?” Ultimately, it seeks to determine how we and the universe around us got where we are.

Seeking to answer these questions are gigantic particle accelerator and collider projects with worldwide scientific involvement and budgets in the billions. Among them are the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland and our nation’s own $1.5 billion electron-ion collider (EIC), expected to come online in the mid-2030s at the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island.

Gain a better understanding of such research and what we are or might be learning through it with the help of Professor Kunnawalkam Elayavalli, a talented science communicator who is involved in groundbreaking physics research.

We’ll start by journeying inside the nucleus and learning the basics of sub-atomic physics.

From there, we’ll get caught up on the huge advances in basic science made by the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, the biggest engineering project in human history, with an estimated cost roughly 10 times that of the Hoover Dam. The Large Hadron Collider was used for experiments that enabled us to discover the Higgs particle, which was deemed responsible for the creation of mass for fundamental particles. It also enabled researchers to recreate conditions like those of the early universe, a few micro-seconds after the Big Bang, and study primordial matter and its evolution.

As is often the case with basic science research, what we have learned so far has only brought up further questions regarding the secrets of the nucleus and the very nature of matter. You’ll learn how the EIC will aid research on this front and what we can expect as the new machine turns on.

It’s a talk that will help you better understand research with the potential to change how we see our world. (Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. The talk starts 30 minutes later.)

Image: The Large Hadron Collider (ATLAS at CERN)